I have tried to get you to activate my account, but have not received a reply. Your policy is to allow people on “ with two or more publications in relevant refereed journals (ApJ, PRD, NJP, PRL, Phys Lett, MNRAS, JCAP..)”

Since I am author or co-author on two ApJ articles as well as several others in cosmology in refereed journals, it would seem I qualify by this rule. Would you agree?

It is evident from the titles of your publications that you harbor doubts about the true... make that the concordance model. Since this forum is all about MC simulation of and data fitting to endless variations of said model, it is hard to see what you could possibly contribute that would be of any value to the esteemed members.

Frankly, letting you in would only force the poor administrators to read and occasionally delete your posts while waiting for a good opportunity to disable your account in the middle of a discussion. Surely you don't want to burden serious data fitters with such tedium?

If you feel an overwhelming urge to post something, consider physics.gen-ph, where nobody will run the risk of reading it.

Thank you for your interest in cosmocoffee. Apologies for the delay in
replying - several of us are travelling at the moment.

We make decisions about cosmocoffee membership, account activation,
suspension and deletion according to our collective judgement of the best interests of the professional cosmology community. This includes, but is not restricted to, a consideration of institutional affiliation and publications.

Unfortunately we will not be activating your account.

Sarah Bridle, Olivier Dore, Antony Lewis, Mike Nolta"

Since no other reason was given, and since I my work is critical of the “concordance cosmology” model, I can only conclude that I am being excluded from Cosmocoffe because of those views.

I would be interested to know what other people think of censoring scientific discussion purely on the basis of what a scientist’s views are, even if he or she is published in refereed journals. Do members of Cosmocoffe agree that it is in the “best interests of the professional cosmology community” that some views are censored by the self-appointed guardians of these “best interests”? Or do people think that freedom of discussion is central to any scientific field?

Of course, if certain members of the “professional cosmology community” have grants, positions and careers that are based on theories that can not stand up to critical discussion and comparison with observation, then perhaps they feel that it is in their “best interests” to suppress debate. But that is certainly not in the “best interests” of the scientific community as a whole. What do people think?

Wow. And here I thought I [Anonymous #2] was being over-the-top ironic.

See it from the positive side: CosmoCoffee now openly acknowledges that it is not a discussion forum about cosmology the science, but rather a special interest group catering to "the best interests of the professional cosmology community", i.e. a small number of almost exclusively public employees. So essentially it's a trade union site.

That's perfectly fine and legitimate as long as it is clearly stated, not only in this thread but in the FAQs and in the posting guidelines. Hopefully that will happen now... right, dear Administrators?

Those who are more interested in discussing science than in securing their next postdoc grant are of course free to start their own discussion forum.